RabbitMQ tutorial - Publish/Subscribe

Publish/Subscribe

(using the .NET Client)

In the previous tutorial we created a work queue. The assumption behind a work queue is that each task is delivered to exactly one worker. In this part we’ll do something completely different – we’ll deliver a message to multiple consumers. This pattern is known as “publish/subscribe”.

To illustrate the pattern, we’re going to build a simple logging system. It will consist of two programs – the first will emit log messages and the second will receive and print them.

In our logging system every running copy of the receiver program will get the messages. That way we’ll be able to run one receiver and direct the logs to disk; and at the same time we’ll be able to run another receiver and see the logs on the screen.

Essentially, published log messages are going to be broadcast to all the receivers.

Exchanges

In previous parts of the tutorial we sent and received messages to and from a queue. Now it’s time to introduce the full messaging model in Rabbit.

Let’s quickly go over what we covered in the previous tutorials:

A producer is a user application that sends messages.

A queue is a buffer that stores messages.

A consumer is a user application that receives messages.

The core idea in the messaging model in RabbitMQ is that the producer never sends any messages directly to a queue. Actually, quite often the producer doesn’t even know if a message will be delivered to any queue at all.

Instead, the producer can only send messages to an exchange. An exchange is a very simple thing. On one side it receives messages from producers and the other side it pushes them to queues. The exchange must know exactly what to do with a message it receives. Should it be appended to a particular queue? Should it be appended to many queues? Or should it get discarded. The rules for that are defined by the exchange type.

There are a few exchange types available: direct, topic, headers and fanout. We’ll focus on the last one – the fanout. Let’s create an exchange of this type, and call it logs:

channel.ExchangeDeclare("logs", "fanout");

The fanout exchange is very simple. As you can probably guess from the name, it just broadcasts all the messages it receives to all the queues it knows. And that’s exactly what we need for our logger.

Listing exchanges
To list the exchanges on the server you can run the ever useful rabbitmqctl:
$ sudo rabbitmqctl list_exchanges
Listing exchanges ...
direct
amq.direct direct
amq.fanout fanout
amq.headers headers
amq.match headers
amq.rabbitmq.log topic
amq.rabbitmq.trace topic
amq.topic topic
logs fanout
...done.
In this list there are some amq.* exchanges and the default (unnamed)
exchange. These are created by default, but it is unlikely you'll need to
use them at the moment.
Nameless exchange
In previous parts of the tutorial we knew nothing about exchanges,
but still were able to send messages to queues. That was possible
because we were using a default exchange, which we identify by the empty string ("").
Recall how we published a message before:
var message = GetMessage(args);
var body = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message);
channel.BasicPublish("", "hello", null, body);
The first parameter is the the name of the exchange.
The empty string denotes the default or nameless exchange: messages are
routed to the queue with the name specified by routingKey, if it exists.

Temporary queues

As you may remember previously we were using queues which had a specified name (remember hello and task_queue?). Being able to name a queue was crucial for us – we needed to point the workers to the same queue. Giving a queue a name is important when you want to share the queue between producers and consumers.

But that’s not the case for our logger. We want to hear about all log messages, not just a subset of them. We’re also interested only in currently flowing messages not in the old ones. To solve that we need two things.

Firstly, whenever we connect to Rabbit we need a fresh, empty queue. To do this we could create a queue with a random name, or, even better - let the server choose a random queue name for us.

Secondly, once we disconnect the consumer the queue should be automatically deleted.

In the .NET client, when we supply no parameters to queueDeclare() we create a non-durable, exclusive, autodelete queue with a generated name:

var queueName = channel.QueueDeclare().QueueName;

At that point queueName contains a random queue name. For example it may look like amq.gen-JzTY20BRgKO-HjmUJj0wLg.

Bindings

We’ve already created a fanout exchange and a queue. Now we need to tell the exchange to send messages to our queue. That relationship between exchange and a queue is called a binding.

Putting it all together

The producer program, which emits log messages, doesn’t look much different from the previous tutorial. The most important change is that we now want to publish messages to our logs exchange instead of the nameless one. We need to supply a routingKey when sending, but its value is ignored for fanout exchanges. Here goes the code for EmitLog.cs file: